Monday 5 November 2007 12.00 EST
First published on Monday 5 November 2007 12.00 EST

New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus goes to Washington's American Enterprise Institute this evening to give a lecture, portentously titled "George Bush and the future of conservatism", in the institute's Albert Wohlstetter conference centre - named for the famed warfare analyst who mentored Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and other intellectual hawks.

Consider the political implications of this event. Not long ago, neoconservative hawks such as Tanenhaus were welcome in much of the conservative movement, which they'd joined to help restore what Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and New York Times columnist (and then Standard writer) David Brooks once called "national greatness conservatism" and to liberate America from a left committed to national smallness.

But the hawks confused "national greatness" with the national-security state and relied on the Bush administration's grand strategies to revive the republic after September 11. Deliverance has not come, and some of them are experiencing subliminal panic as the foundations of governance and civil society shift under their feet.

They strove to make themselves indispensable to national revival, but they are discovering that they have made themselves as disposable as Bush, from whom Tanenhaus will no doubt distance himself in his lecture. The problem is not really Bush, however, but the national-security dispensation to which the neoconservatives are irretrievably beholden, thanks in no small part to the national security strategists and cheerleaders at AEI.

Brooks credited "national greatness conservatism" to his childhood hero, the 19th century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, who, as Brooks put it, strove to transform "the Tory party from the rich man's party to the party of patriotism.... National conservatism meant caring for the whole nation, rich and poor. It also meant feeling a mystical attachment to his country's exceptional character...."

Neoconservatives thought they'd found their champion in George Bush, whom Brooks likened to Teddy Roosevelt. But Bush failed them, and too many American conservatives became enthralled to the clanking, blundering glories of empire and the digital wonders of a global capital that does not care for any "whole nation". The conservative movement retained neoconservatives mainly as ornaments or flak-catchers, prompting some - like Wolfowitz - to jump ship and others, like Brooks, Bill Kristol and Tanenhaus, to hunt for scapegoats for their own and their movement's worst blunders and fears. They embraced a jingoism which the scholar David Bromwich notes was defined by the journalist JA Hobson in 1901 as "inverted patriotism whereby the love of one's own nation is transformed into the hatred of another nation, and the fierce craving to destroy individual members of that other nation.... Jingoism is the passion of the spectator, the inciter, the backer, not of the fighter."

The neocon and liberal war hawks learned only too well what Hobson called "the methods by which a knot of men, financiers and politicians, can capture the mind of a nation, arouse its passion, and impose a policy.... [F]reedom of speech, public meeting, and press not merely affords no adequate protection against this danger, but... it is itself menaced and impaired; the system of party, [in our case, the Republican party] which has heretofore, by providing a free, vigorous, and genuine scrutiny of every important political proposal, been a strong safeguard against all endeavors of a clique or a class to exploit the commonwealth, has broken down under the strain of an attack unprecedented in its vigour and in the skill of its direction."

That will be history's judgment of this war's intellectual hawks, and as Tanenhaus struggles this evening to deflect that judgment, it would be well to recall his own "vigour and skill" in attack before he became an editor. Although he isn't often a polemical writer, Tanenhaus did make a revealing, pointed, deft attack on critics of the impending Iraq war in Slate in October, 2002.

Watch how he moved: cleverly, but no doubt sincerely, he targeted a paleo-conservative war critic, the isolationist Pat Buchanan, for a column whose calls for peace came, as Tanenhaus put it, "in cadences that are strangely martial ... [Buchanan] reminds us that hubris undid [past empires]. Guess who's next: 'We will soon launch an imperial war on Iraq...' Once Saddam falls, [Buchanan] warns, the neoconservatives who pine for a World War IV will push for 'short sharp wars on Syria and Iran. Already Israel is tugging at our sleeve, reminding us not to forget Libya.'"

Tanenhaus defended the impending Iraq war backhandedly by likening Buchanan's dissent to another kind: "Does his anti-imperialist argument sound familiar? It should. It's the same one the anti-war left is making ... For all its newfound pacifism, the 'Buchananite' worldview remains a bully's, more authoritarian than libertarian..." Like conservatives in the 1960s, Tanenhaus considers war protesters more dangerous than war-makers. He finds them too sentimental, too: Buchanan's isolationism, he wrote, is "less an act of rebellion than of nostalgia, even of archaism.... That's not quixotic. It's sentimental. And when it comes to sentiment, as Buchanan should know by now, the liberals always win."

So much for anti-war critics, those weepy authoritarian liberals. By using Buchanan as a Trojan horse to attack them in Slate, how can one lose?

The neocons have tried to sideline not only paleocons such as Buchanan but also theocons such as the grand inquisitorial Father Richard John Neuhaus, not to mention myriad authoritarian-libertarians in the mold of Ayn Rand. They've also exerted themselves prodigiously in the years of conservative ascendancy to persuade wavering liberals that enlightened Americans belong in a conservative movement that is right about something besides how liberals and the left have been wrong. But they have nothing to show of a "modern, nationalist conservatism" that cares for "rich and poor." And they have been embarrassed by the belligerent Norman Podhoretz and other such bounders in their midst.

Tanenhaus' disingenuous arraignment of Buchanan in order to indict liberals resembles a similar dodge in his observation in the New Republic last July that if the anti-communist scourge Whittaker Chambers were alive today, he would dismiss Bush's crusading zeal in the Iraq "with the sly half-smile of a melancholy man who knows better." Here, too, Tanenhaus turned his criticism of conservatives into an occasion for left-bashing. Quoting George Orwell's observation that English intellectuals' attraction to Stalinism "betrayed 'a secret wish...[to] usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip," Tanenhaus decided: "It is no less true today. The intellectual left, most conspicuously in its Ivy League, Manhattan and Hollywood variants, still clings to its dream of the whip handle, just as the educated right dreams of the day when the intelligentsia will be the first to feel the stinging cord."

Like his use of Buchanan to justify attacking what he was really after, the left, Tanenhaus' closing gesture toward balance in the New Republic ("the educated right") was a fig leaf for his lust to catch leftists dreaming of whips.

If Tanenhaus "balances" his criticisms of Bush this evening yet again with diversionary attacks on liberals and the left, many in his AEI audience will be desperately grateful. They still seem to think that assailing war critics or proponents of national health care will confirm them as guardians of national greatness. But they are giving the nation away because they cannot reconcile their keening for a sacred, ordered liberty with their obeisance to every whim of capital.

Yes, Tanenhaus takes the podium in a time of unease for neoconservatives. Character is destiny, and their bottomless insecurities have made them political fantasists without a home, except at AEI. The questions that will dog them are fearsome indeed.

Did their service to the national security state really protect the republic's vital interests and nourish its strengths? Or did it damage what they claimed to defend? Who was naive, the war critics or the war hawks?

Mightn't it be partly because these prominent opinion-makers doubted themselves more deeply than they admit that they were so insistent in their jingoism and smearing of dissenters? Might not a very deep American self-doubt, indeed, be what drove some of them to become so prominent and authoritative in the first place?

And don't the ways in which the neoconservative hawks have disparaged dissenters resemble uncannily the ways other people in other times have disparaged Jews? Now, as in other times and places, these apologists for power have told the public that a minority with limited clout and much vulnerability has a decisive, degenerative influence over policy. Now, as then, they have encouraged the public to regard not just silly screamers but some of civil society's most unstinting adherents as its most conspiratorial and parasitical offenders. Now, as then, those who demand that the republic keep its promises are cast as the most disloyal to it.

A fuller reckoning with the questions I've posed has yet to begin. It is coming, but not this evening at the American Enterprise Institute.